Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:53am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Resilience and Dystopian Cities in Latin America Session Chair: Kristen Graves Discussant: Alyssa Cottle | |
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Listening to the Haunted City: Tango and the Spectral Geographies of Buenos Aires Harvard University This paper examines tango as a sonic practice through which the city of Buenos Aires is imagined, remembered, and progressively deterritorialized. By putting Jorge Luis Borges’s framing of tango as a metaphysical expression of Buenos Aires, emerging from liminal zones where past and present, myth and modernity collide (Borges 1953) in dialogue with hauntological thought (Derrida 1994) and cultural theories of urban space (Duarte 2017), I argue that tango articulates Buenos Aires not as a fixed place but as a spectral city: a network of sounds, texts, and affects through which urban space is continually reconstituted. First, I focus on Troilo and Manzi’s 1948 tango “Sur” (south) and its later counterpart “Vuelvo al Sur” (Piazzolla/Ferrer), famously paired in Fernando Solanas’s 1988 film Sur. I argue that “Sur” territorializes Buenos Aires by naming specific neighborhoods and sensory landmarks unfolding a Bakhtinian chronotope—a condensation of time, space, and subjectivity (Bakhtin 1981). Yet this geography is mediated by melancholy and retrospection: “the South” is not a lived but a remembered space, shaped by what Svetlana Boym (2001) identifies as modern nostalgia—a longing for a world whose borders and values have eroded. “Vuelvo al sur,” by contrast, completes a process of deterritorialization. Place names dissolve and “the south” survives only as an affective refrain. Geography is no longer mapped but invoked; territory becomes specter. Finally, I turn to Piazzolla and Ferrer’s María de Buenos Aires (1968), where this spectralization becomes structural. Piazzolla claimed that tango is “the music of Buenos Aires,” yet in María this equation is radically reimagined. The “barrio” is no longer operative. María is not from a neighborhood but simply from Buenos Aires, rendered as an abstract, phantasmagoric city populated by doubles, shadows, and infernal echoes. I argue that María de Buenos Airesstages tango’s hauntological condition: the genre persists as a ghost of its former territorial anchoring, simultaneously invoking and undoing its urban myths. By bringing hauntology into dialogue with musical analysis, this paper reframes tango not merely as the “music of the city,” but as a practice through which Buenos Aires haunts itself—listening to its own ruins. | |